Memory, Grief, Three O'clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 38
a voice floats easily over the Alps
June 2, 3.35 a.m.
Was talking a while back with friends about earliest childhood memories, about how they’re subject to invention and reinvention, conflation and layering. We tinker with them as we grow, adjust them to what we imagine must have been the circumstances of their making. We are not our own most reliable narrators. We hear language from the get-go — hear it in utero — and there must be a moment when, for the first time, those sounds stop being abstractions and attach themselves to meaning. I think I remember that moment. I’m sure I do, but I’m also sure I could so easily have made it up. I don’t know how old I would have been, under 2. We must have just moved into the house where I would grow up and my parents would live for 40 years. It would have been about this time of year, it was warm enough to be outside. In the memory, I’m on green grass, our lawn, in a contained place — a playpen. Two little girls are on the other side of the bars, looking in. Petting zoo. They must have been neighbour children, come to inspect the new arrivals on the street. One of them — perhaps she was 5 or 6, seeing me as a kind of doll — said, “Isn’t he cute?” There. I was never told what might have been the first word I spoke but the first words I understood were — “Isn’t he cute?” And I think I also understood that I’d been dealt a card to play. I’d been given something I could use to my advantage, something to live up to. Sometimes I think my whole life has been about trying to be cute. Ach. If only they’d bound me wrist to ankle at that point and left me for the wolves, how much easier it would have been. Oh, well. They didn’t. Here we are.
I remember my first disappointment, and I can date it, too — July 24, 1959 — thanks to this press release issued by the Province of Manitoba. (And no, my first disappointment, monumental though it was, was not the occasion of its writing.)
Along with thousands of other loyal citizens of Winnipeg, my parents and two brothers and I lined the parade route. This must have been while the royal couple and entourage were going to receive the rent from the Hudson’s Bay Company, because we were in the park. I was two weeks shy of my fourth birthday, but I already had a clear idea of what a queen should travel in, and that was a golden coach that had formerly been a pumpkin and that it should be pulled by cream-coloured horses who, until recently, had been mice. That was what I was looking for, what I felt I had been promised, and I paid no attention when a usual looking convertible with a usual looking woman rolled by, waving, waving. When all the vehicles had passed — this I remember — I turned to my parents and wailed, “But where’s the Queen? Where’s the Queen?” They must have explained, but all I remember is my clear sense of let-down, or betrayal. A monarchist was lost that day.
I’m not sure what Mavis Gallant (MG) thought about the monarchy. I suspect she was, especially as a young woman and a fervent socialist and as someone who was steeped in both the French and Anglo ethos of Montreal, opposed in the main, though no doubt her feelings were more nuanced than that.
MG’s story “The Remission” appeared in The New Yorker on August 13, 1979, two days after our shared birthday. Alec Webb has come to the Riviera, on the French Italian border, territory MG knew well, to die. With him are his wife, Barbara, and their three children. (In Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear, Marta Dvorak says that MG told her that her mother haunted the story, informed the character of Barbara.) Here is the section that pertains to the Coronation, to which MG, a recent arrival in Europe in 1952, must have paid attention. There are many people of my generation who can remember the first television arriving on their street or community, the gathering around, the amazement when the image flooded the screen. This reminded me, too, of another great July disappointment, July 20, 1969, the moon walk, when, just as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface, our old black and white went on the fritz, as my mother used to say, and we saw nothing but wavy lines, heard nothing but static. Oh, life. Long live the Queen. Thanks for reading, xo, B
However, he went on living.
Pretty much sums it all up doesn’t it?
A few days ago I went down the rabbit hole of genealogy. I love that term, rabbit hole. So crude, yet so mysterious. My sister-in-law asked me about “our Family”. In the words of my departed Mother, I didn’t have a clue. But down I went. ( Just there, as I typed the letter I, for myself, me, the person that I am, the algorithm changed it to ai- artificial intelligence.)
I digress. It seems that is my very essence- Digression. I fell into a major digression, not a minor aggression. Anyway to cut to the chase, as they say, I went online and googled my grandparents, found out new information I had never known, been told, or at the very least, even if I was told, remembered. I am of Huguenot blood on my mother’s side, and Upper Empire Loyalist on my father’s side. So by rights and blood I should be a monarchist. God Save The Queen. But as an ex-punk, my feelings are more complicated than that. Anywho, I respect my elders ( like Bill), and the Queen, and raise a glass for almost any reason. She has survived and endured when mere mortals have fallen into rabbit holes. And for that, she earns my respect.